[TriLUG] email content filtering

[Jon Carnes]

I ran SpamAssassin as a daemon on an older PC (650Mhz, 768Mb RAM) and it
easily handled 8,000 emails/day.  I estimate that if we raised the RAM
to a full 1Gb then the box could easily have handled three times that
amount of mail. There were around 180 individual accounts, and probably
500 corporate alias/group accounts. 

Folks on the Mail Scanner list report scanning up-wards of 250,000
emails/day on their systems, and in this case they are scanning both for
viruses and for spam.

If you overload a system that is running SpamAssassin by throwing too
much mail at it, then the mail will simply queue up. Normal latency (for
the system I set up at my former employer) added an average of 5 seconds
to incoming email.  Of course you only test incoming email... The peak
latency was around 25 minutes - with the peak occurring late at night.

SpamAssassin is really quite amazing.  We've talked about it on this
list before, so I won't repeat the details again, but if you want more
info, drop me line and I'll be happy to describe how it works in detail
for you.

Jon
===
On Sun, 2002-09-01 at 11:58, William Ward wrote:
> Hi Jon,
> 
> Thanks for the information.  I also forwarded a copy of your e-mail to 
> the lady who heads up the administration of our e-mail content 
> management program.  I know she's been looking at Brightmail as a 
> solution, but I know Brightmail is expensive.
> 
> If its not too intrusive, how many mailboxes is your SpamAssassin box 
> covering?  Our current configuration has two front-end boxes running 
> the Trend anti-spam software, so duplicating efforts for redundancy is 
> already in place using that product.  I'd assume a comparable computer 
> running Linux should be able to push a bit more traffic than Windows 
> 2000 running the Trend relay.
> 
> Thanks again for the insight.
> 
> Bill
>